Exposing the Gimmick?

Chris Matthews once famously and disgustingly said former Vice President Al Gore would lick the bathroom floor to be president.

Tonight, with the Vice Presidential candidate debate, we will find out if Matthews should have been speaking about John McCain.

Viewers will get to see if Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is the next chapter of George "all hat and no cattle" W. Bush. To many, McCain's choice of Sarah Palin was little more than a gimmick designed to attract women and conservatives voters and the Washington Post is reporting polling is now showing that the people are turning against the gimmick.

Any doubt of this was on display during the recent interviews with CBS's Katie Couric where Palin embarrassed herself, John McCain, the Republican Party, conservatives, and America through her inability to name any Supreme Court cases she disagreed with other than Roe vs. Wade, the inability to name newspapers or magazines she read, or the rambling and incoherent answer she gave regarding why Alaska's proximity to Russia gave her foreign policy experience.

Amazingly, Palin couldn't even remember Exxon v. Baker, which for most people wouldn't be a surprise except it involved Alaska and the Exxon Valdez and Palin criticized the ruling earlier this year. Perhaps her excuse is that someone in her office just put her name on a release.

What must foreign countries think of her, and us, that we would potentially entrust the most powerful position in the world to someone without experience, knowledge or interest in events? We tried that in 2000 and the results have been disastrous. Do we really want to try it again?

Faced with a potential disaster tonight conservatives have tried lowering the bar for success by Palin to the point where if she doesn't embarrass herself it will be a success. But with even that lower bar conservatives have decided they need to "work the referee" in order to protect Palin by alleging that moderator Gwen Ifill of PBS is biased because she is working on a book titled "The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama."

FOX News is asking whether Ifill can be "fair and balanced" in the debate. Truthfully, given the nature of conservatives Ifill should have seen this coming as nothing is ever fair in their world unless they are given an advantage, but for FOX to be questioning whether someone is fair and balanced is like a loan shark criticizing interest rates on credit cards.

In the end the questions don't matter, Palin will give a number of snappy, mean spirited responses which the public will either fall for or decide her story has become tiresome. At best Republicans can hope Sen. Joe Biden makes a mistake to hide her performance or that concern about conservative complaints that Biden attaced Palin makes him pull his punches in the debate.

We shall see.